A Brief Interlude With Expert Opinion

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I thought it seemed like a good day to check in with Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who was central to the adoption here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) of what we still like to call Romneycare which, of course, was the template for the jackbooted slavering tyranny of the Affordable Care Act. After all, the stepchild is going to get up and walk next week, and the Republicans are going more than a little mad over the whole notion. This would be a good time to see how amazed Jonathan Gruber is by the whole circus.

The answer is...utterly.

"In my experience," he said, "it is totally unprecedented to keep challenging a law that's already been passed. The Republicans know that, once this takes place, they're in big trouble because it's going to work."

Gruber shares my amusement with the fact that the Republicans are all in favor of those parts of the law that poll really, really well -- the protections for folks with pre-existing conditions, the ability of kids to stay on their parent's insurance until they're 25, and the ban on lifetime caps -- but have announced their unyielding opposition to all the provisions in the law that make those things possible, specifically the individual mandate. This, he reminds us, hearkens back to the golden days of St. Ronnie, who told us we could have a massive tax cut, a massive military spending spree, and no cuts at all in the programs we love because...sparkle ponies!

"What's been great about this process is that it's been a fairly intellectually honest process," said Gruber. "You have to have your spinach if you're going to have your cake. That's what the Republicans are pretending not to understand. Up here in Massachusetts, the biggest opponent of the individual mandate was John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO. He said it was going to be the end of employer-based health-care here. Well, that certainly wasn't the case.

"The analogy I like to use is a building that's burning down. The number of people covered by employer-based health-care plans is dropping by a percentage point a year. The system is falling apart. So you put in a new safety net. That means a few more people are going to come in. If you're not willing to risk making some things worse, you're never going to make anything better. My estimate is that 80 percent of the people are not going to feel any change at all, and that 17 percent or so are going to find that things are better, and that about two or three percent will be worse off, and those are the people who benefit from the discriminatory nature of health-insurance at the present time. If health-insurance companies can't discriminate any more, those people will have to pay a little more. When we decided that people couldn't discriminate in what they paid black people or women any more, people had to pay more because employers couldn't discriminate in what they paid black people and women. Was that a bad thing?

"And the thing is, the administration cannot bend at all on this. The employer mandate? OK, I don't have a problem with delaying that a year. But the rest of the stuff -- the individual mandate and that, the essential features of the law -- they can't bend at all on those."

Gruber saves some special scorn for the Republican governors who have bravely said no to...Free Money!

"What I don't get is these stupid governors who are turning down the Medicaid expansion," he said. "This is preposterously stupid. First of all, your low-income people get health-insurance, and you get billions and billions of dollars of stimulus in health-care spending. For example, there are one million uninsured Floridians who are below the poverty line. The federal government is saying we'll pay to insure them, and, in addition, we're sending billions of dollars to you. And Rick Scott says no. There is no basis for turning this down except to put your political agenda ahead of the needs of your state's citizens. They say they're worried about the federal deficit? Why? They're governors, for god's sake. This is one of the criminal failures of our political system. It is an enormous failure."

Turns out it was a good day to check in with Gruber. Of course, lined up on the other side, we have the entreaties of millions of misinformed, Bible-banging suckers, so there's that.